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The Five Initatives

EXPANDED ELECTRONIC GOVERNMENT

The President Urges Agencies to Work Together on 24 E-Gov Projects

We Are Spending $50 Billion On Information Technology!
The government spends well over $50 billion a year on information technology. If used well -- it can significantly improve how agencies perform their missions and free up additional funds for agencies to use in achieving those missions. If used poorly-- and in the past we have had too many examples of this -- it can lead to unnecessary spending by the government and unneeded burdens on the public.

E-Gov Will Eliminate Burden On Small Businesses
A small business may have to submit compliance reports about its operations to three different agencies. That firm spends a lot of time and wasted effort by sending three different forms, following three different processes, and complying with three different IT systems. As an E-government, we should operate as a team to create a single avenue for communicating with the government and share the information according to each agency's requirements.
E-Gov Is Not Just Putting Forms Online
E-gov does not mean putting scores of government forms on the Internet. It is about using technology to its fullest to provide services and information that is centered around citizen groups.

What We Have Done So Far
In February, we released our E-Government strategy and Vice President Cheney re-launched our centerpiece website, www.FirstGov.gov.

In April, we launched www.GovBenefits.gov to provide easy access to government benefit information.

24 E-Gov Initiatives
The President's E-gov strategy unifies and streamlines some 500 programs into 24 citizen-friendly, citizen-focused, and citizen-first programs.

Here is the deployment schedule for the 24 initiatives:
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To be successful, these initiatives require the involvement of cross agency teams. Recognizing that not all members of the President's Management Council need to be directly involved in each initiative, the PMC's E-gov committee has grouped the 24 initiatives into three categories:
  • PMC driven - those that require extensive involvement and commitment by members of the President's Management Council;

  • Agency coalition driven - those being driven primarily by a coalition of 3-5 agency partners;

  • Single agency driven - those being handled by a single agency partner.
The Role Of "Managing Partners"
The department or agency which is managing partner for each initiative will build the necessary funding into its FY 2004 budget request and will work with partner agencies to develop a multi-agency business case. OMB will take responsibility during the budgeting process to reject or integrate duplicative requests, in order to avoid the financing issues that have arisen in FY 2002.

For managing partners in particular, the PMC Committee encourages senior political officials at agencies to take a close look at the business cases and sign off on them before bringing them to the Committee for endorsement. The Committee anticipates that progress reports and business case updates will be handled in the same way.

What The Public Expects
We know that the public expects this kind of service from the government, and that it uses the Internet more than ever before. Polling data from the Pew Foundation, for example, show that over 40 million Americans went online to look at Federal, State and local government policies, and over 20 million used the Internet to send their views to governments about those policies. This and similar data show that if we harness the power of technology, we will be meeting expectations of an increasingly wired citizenry.

What The President Expects
The President is urging us all to actively engage in cross-agency teamwork:

"Our success depends on agencies working as a team across traditional boundaries to better serve the American people, focusing on citizens rather than individual agency needs . . . I thank agencies who have actively engaged in cross-agency teamwork, using E-government to create more cost-effective and efficient ways to serve citizens, and I urge others to follow their lead."
We Cannot Do This Alone
To be successful, each member of the Administration's team has to reach across agency boundaries to meet the challenge of creating a government that works for everyone. This means that for some of the initiatives listed above, agencies will have to share financial and FTE resources with each other in ways that they have not done before. But as successful e-businesses demonstrated in the last decade, busting silos can lead to greater efficiencies and better performance for both the enterprise as a whole - in this case, the Federal government - and for each of its components - or, in this case, each agency.

We All Need To Work Together
The unacceptable alternative is for agencies to spend money in redundant and unrelated ways, which means each agency has less to spend on the mission areas that matter - like educating students, cleaning the air, or serving our veterans. We cannot be bound by a parochial sense of false ownership or bureaucratic territory.

Sincerely,

Mark Forman



The Five Initatives:
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